Eat Like Gwyneth Day 6: An old favorite, but a new recipe…buttermilk pancakes!

Willow and Stephanie (registered dietitians from C&J Nutrition
and SELF contributing experts) are testing recipes from Gwyneth
Paltrow's new cookbook, "My Father's Daughter." Let's see what they
thought of our May cover girl's family-inspired dishes.

We don't know a single person who doesn't love pancakes -- and we're no exception! In fact, we make them for each other on our birthdays and other special occasions. That's why we were especially excited (but also reluctant...we're a bit set in our pancake ways) to try Bruce Paltrow's World-Famous Pancakes recipe. We think you all are going to love it. And the pictures are tasty too!

These aren’t just any pancakes. Let us be the first to say that we were skeptical. The two of us have been making our trail mix pancakes (whole wheat pancakes with oats, cinnamon, and tons of fruit, nuts, seeds — and sometimes even pumpkin — added) for a long time now and are pretty much obsessed with them. So the thought of making plain-Jane pancakes was not especially appealing. But, we told ourselves that we could always spruce them up with fruit and yogurt toppings and quickly got to work.

We had all the ingredients on-hand except for buttermilk, whole milk, and white flour. Actually, we did have white flour left over from the blueberry muffins — but we normally don’t have that either.

We used low-fat buttermilk and discovered that it’s a lot like one of our fave things — kefir! That got us thinking that we’d totally love to try this recipe again using Lifeway low-fat plain kefir (or the vanilla or limited edition Birthday Cake flavor) in place of some of the buttermilk to add fun flavors. Also, if you don’t have buttermilk (or don’t want to buy it just for one recipe) you can use one cup of plain milk mixed with 1 Tbsp. vinegar as a substitute.

The batter ingredients get mixed without the milk and left in the fridge overnight. Gwyneth notes to not over-mix the batter and we agree – we stirred it for no more than 30 seconds for the ingredients to combine nicely.

You can tell right away that the batter is super fluffy and light. It’s also really fast/simple to make. In the morning, the batter is really puffy and reminded us of meringue.

We added the milk to the batter — but only added about 1/4 cup (Gwyneth notes that the more milk you add, the thinner the pancakes will be.) We wanted thicker p-cakes!

Oh. My. Yum. These pancakes rock. Seriously, if you need a go-to pancake recipe that people will no doubt love, we’d recommend this for traditional pancakes. The texture was somewhere between a crepe and a pancake and the flavor was lightly sweet.

Because these were sweet on their own, we think that fruit and yogurt would be awesome toppings.

We’ll definitely be making these again and experimenting with using kefir and whole wheat or oat flour (and probably adding some bananas and walnuts). Oh also, did you know you can freeze pancakes? We always do this with leftover pancakes, freezing them individually wrapped in plastic wrap. Then, on busy mornings, just pop em in the microwave and they’re ready to be topped and eaten.

We love topping our pancakes with all types of yogurt-fruit-nut combos (and throwing these things right into the batter). Anyone have any cool pancake additions and/or toppings for us to try? If so, please share in the comments! Oh, and stay tuned for tomorrow’s post. It’s about as far away from pancakes as you could possibly get… and NOT for the faint of heart (not kidding).